Inside Visual Studio 2008 127
mlimber writes "Dr Dobb's Journal has a peek at what is new in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. Most of the features discussed in the article are related to .NET, web development, and the IDE itself. However, Herb Sutter, Microsoft software architect and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee, blogged about some developments on the C++ front. This includes a significantly enhanced MFC for GUI building, and the inclusion of TR1 (library extensions published by the C++ standards committee, most of which have also been incorporated into the next C++ standard)."
Kudos to the Visual Studio Team (Score:5, Interesting)
C99 yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:C99 yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, lots of people write new stuff in C all the time. But, even if nobody did that, there are still a ton of people with existing C codebases that they are still working with. IIRC, Win32, Carbon, and GTK+ are all C API's, even if they have bindings to other languages. Lots of video and multimedia stuff is done in C, like the Dirac reference implimentation, gstreamer, ffmpeg, etc. When people talk about how C is dead, and nobody writes anything in C, they generally mean that higher level languages are used to glue together a bunch of C.
wake me up in 1998 (Score:4, Interesting)
Fast forward to 2008, if Microsoft can't be bothered, others can, so now they bother. Kind of like arriving at a New Year's party at half past twelve. The champagne is gone, and when you make your grand entrance into the room full of glassy expressions, everyone slaps you on the back and says "hey, glad you could make it". Almost like being there.
Re:Thanks for asking (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, what's so difficult about the memory management model of C? I find it hard to think of anything much simpler. The great thing about C (IMHO) is that if you didn't write it, it won't happen.
Is it any better than Visual Studio 6? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have they brought back the keyboard macro's? They were there in VS6 but I could never find them in later versions.
Re:Is it any better than Visual Studio 6? (Score:5, Interesting)
Developers, developers, developers, developers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Upgrades to MFC? what upgrades? (Score:5, Interesting)
What do they mean?
Do they mean, perhaps, that widgets are now normal objects? no double-creation (first new Object, then object->CreateWindow).
Could they mean that all widgets are destroyed in the same way? no object->DestroyWindow for some widgets, delete object for some other widgets?
How about some serious memory management using shared pointers? no temp CBrush objects etc.
How about layout management? all serious widget toolkits have that. It's 2008, we should not have to position widgets manually.
What about the tab widget? in MFC, the tab widget is not a real widget: you have to manually hide and show controls upon tab click.
What about the model-view-controller pattern? this is 2008, should I still manually copy edited data from widgets to the data model of my application? most other toolkits support the MVC pattern. Dialog Data eXchange is a joke, of course.
How about the issue of message maps? Qt proves you don't need stinkin' message maps, which are hard to maintain, difficult to understand, and dangerous because casting is untyped and done through macros.
How about MIME type support?
These, and a lot more, are the issues that have driven developers away from MFC to Qt or WxWidgets. I have been maintaining a line of products based on MFC for the last 10 years, but this year I've decided I had enough: all the products are to be rewritten with Qt/WxWidgets. I will only approach MFC if it will approach Qt/WxWidgets quality.
Re:C99 yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CL (Score:4, Interesting)